Labour should pledge to make the government a living wage employer

The government claims to be a proponent of the living wage. David Cameron says he supported it at the last election and believes it is an idea "whose time has come". Earlier this year he told the World Economic Forum in Davos that "where companies can pay the living wage, they should". Yet for all the warm words, government departments continue to drag their feet over becoming accredited living wage employers.

Rather than leading the way, ministers still insist that a living wage is a cost we perhaps can’t afford. As Lord Deighton, the Commercial Secretary to the Treasury, told Parliament in 2013: "requiring employers to pay a living wage could be burdensome to business and damage the employment prospects of low-paid workers". When confronted with the argument that it may be a price worth paying, Downing Street retorts that, anyway, living wage clauses in public procurement breach EU law (a view strong disputed by the European Commission, as well as by Boris Johnson).

If the GLA and a long list of local authorities, universities and charities can pay the living wage, why not Whitehall? Indeed, our study on "setting a fair pay standard: the government as a living wage employer" (here) shows that the cost of paying all low-paid Whitehall workers the living wage would be only £18m – equivalent to 0.002 per cent of total public spending. This would include all in-house employees as well as cleaners, security, catering staff etc who are contracted in. The cost would still be only around £23m even if contractors didn’t absorb any of the costs involved in taking pay rates up to the London living wage level (£8.80).

Alan Buckle’s recently published report on low pay for the Labour Party recommends that central government departments should become accredited living wage employers and use the power of procurement to encourage organisations bidding for contracts to pay their staff a living wage. This would ensure that all sub-contractors pay the living wage to any staff working on government contracts. Our analysis suggests that this would cover nearly 200,000 people, and approximately 30,000 people would see their pay increase as a result. Many of those low-paid workers who would benefit are currently working for the DWP, which is committed on paper at least to paying the living wage.

There’s a lot of complex number crunching involved in evaluating the cost to government of paying the living wage. Some workers are paid close to the living wage which means the uplift costs are low, others are on the National Minimum Wage and could see their wages rising significantly; there are issues around how much different contractors in different services can afford to contribute, and how phasing might operate; how best to factor in know-on employment effects and productivity gains; and what impact will pay rises at the bottom have on wage differentials? All are important considerations, but not impossible for government to work out. What is most striking is that the overall costs to the taxpayer are low because government gets a dividend back from tax receipts and reduced benefit payments. According to our analysis, the tax and benefit savings of moving 30,000 workers onto the living wage would be some £20m. That’s roughly half the total cost of becoming a living wage employer.

Ed Miliband has flirted with several ideas over how to support the living wage, including council-backed living wage zones and tax breaks to private firms. Each have their merits and demerits. But surely it is best to start with the public sector. Government, after all, is a major employer of low-paid workers and has huge buying power. Ministers can set the pace on the living wage and force and cajole the business community to follow.

In Scotland, Holyrood recently voted down an amendment to the Procurement Reform Bill by Labour to introduce a "Scottish Living Wage duty" - which would make it compulsory for companies who wanted to win work from the public sector to pay the living wage. This was something of an embarrassment for the SNP, which boasts that the Scottish government is an accredited living wage employer.

Labour should be bolder on the living wage than Salmond or Cameron and give a clear and unequivocal commitment over the term of a parliament to making not just Whitehall, but all public bodies living wage employers. The opportunity is there to outflank the Tories, whose credibility on tackling low pay and endorsement of the living wage needs to be challenged. There is a cost and the big contractors will fight against paying their share, but as our report shows, even at a time of fiscal austerity, it is a small price for a big gain.

Hannan Fodder: This week, Daniel Hannan gets his excuses in early

Since Daniel Hannan, a formerly obscure MEP, has emerged as the anointed intellectual of the Brexit elite, The Staggers is charting his ascendancy...

When I started this column, there were some nay-sayers talking Britain down by doubting that I was seriously going to write about Daniel Hannan every week. Surely no one could be that obsessed with the activities of one obscure MEP? And surely no politician could say enough ludicrous things to be worthy of such an obsession?

They were wrong, on both counts. Daniel and I are as one on this: Leave and Remain, working hand in glove to deliver on our shared national mission. There’s a lesson there for my fellow Remoaners, I’m sure.

Anyway. It’s week three, and just as I was worrying what I might write this week, Dan has ridden to the rescue by writing not one but two columns making the same argument – using, indeed, many of the exact same phrases (“not a club, but a protection racket”). Like all the most effective political campaigns, Dan has a message of the week.

First up, on Monday, there was this headline, in the conservative American journal, the Washington Examiner:

“We will get a good deal – because rational self-interest will overcome the Eurocrats’ fury”

The message of the two columns is straightforward: cooler heads will prevail. Britain wants an amicable separation. The EU needs Britain’s military strength and budget contributions, and both sides want to keep the single market intact.

The Con Home piece makes the further argument that it’s only the Eurocrats who want to be hardline about this. National governments – who have to answer to actual electorates – will be more willing to negotiate.

And so, for all the bluster now, Theresa May and Donald Tusk will be skipping through a meadow, arm in arm, before the year is out.

Before we go any further, I have a confession: I found myself nodding along with some of this. Yes, of course it’s in nobody’s interests to create unnecessary enmity between Britain and the continent. Of course no one will want to crash the economy. Of course.

I’ve been told by friends on the centre-right that Hannan has a compelling, faintly hypnotic quality when he speaks and, in retrospect, this brief moment of finding myself half-agreeing with him scares the living shit out of me. So from this point on, I’d like everyone to keep an eye on me in case I start going weird, and to give me a sharp whack round the back of the head if you ever catch me starting a tweet with the word, “Friends-”.

Anyway. Shortly after reading things, reality began to dawn for me in a way it apparently hasn’t for Daniel Hannan, and I began cataloguing the ways in which his argument is stupid.

Problem number one: Remarkably for a man who’s been in the European Parliament for nearly two decades, he’s misunderstood the EU. He notes that “deeper integration can be more like a religious dogma than a political creed”, but entirely misses the reason for this. For many Europeans, especially those from countries which didn’t have as much fun in the Second World War as Britain did, the EU, for all its myriad flaws, is something to which they feel an emotional attachment: not their country, but not something entirely separate from it either.

Consequently, it’s neither a club, nor a “protection racket”: it’s more akin to a family. A rational and sensible Brexit will be difficult for the exact same reasons that so few divorcing couples rationally agree not to bother wasting money on lawyers: because the very act of leaving feels like a betrayal.

Problem number two: even if everyone was to negotiate purely in terms of rational interest, our interests are not the same. The over-riding goal of German policy for decades has been to hold the EU together, even if that creates other problems. (Exhibit A: Greece.) So there’s at least a chance that the German leadership will genuinely see deterring more departures as more important than mutual prosperity or a good relationship with Britain.

And France, whose presidential candidates are lining up to give Britain a kicking, is mysteriously not mentioned anywhere in either of Daniel’s columns, presumably because doing so would undermine his argument.

So – the list of priorities Hannan describes may look rational from a British perspective. Unfortunately, though, the people on the other side of the negotiating table won’t have a British perspective.

Problem number three is this line from the Con Home piece:

“Might it truly be more interested in deterring states from leaving than in promoting the welfare of its peoples? If so, there surely can be no further doubt that we were right to opt out.”

I could go on, about how there’s no reason to think that Daniel’s relatively gentle vision of Brexit is shared by Nigel Farage, UKIP, or a significant number of those who voted Leave. Or about the polls which show that, far from the EU’s response to the referendum pushing more European nations towards the door, support for the union has actually spiked since the referendum – that Britain has become not a beacon of hope but a cautionary tale.

But I’m running out of words, and there’ll be other chances to explore such things. So instead I’m going to end on this:

Hannan’s argument – that only an irrational Europe would not deliver a good Brexit – is remarkably, parodically self-serving. It allows him to believe that, if Brexit goes horribly wrong, well, it must all be the fault of those inflexible Eurocrats, mustn’t it? It can’t possibly be because Brexit was a bad idea in the first place, or because liberal Leavers used nasty, populist ones to achieve their goals.

Read today, there are elements of Hannan’s columns that are compelling, even persuasive. From the perspective of 2020, I fear, they might simply read like one long explanation of why nothing that has happened since will have been his fault.

Jonn Elledge is the editor of the New Statesman's sister site CityMetric. He is on Twitter, far too much, as @JonnElledge.